Lee Smith - The Consequences of Syria

HERBERT AND JANE DWIGHT WORKING GROUP ON ISL AMISM AND THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER

ESSAY SERIES:

THE GREAT UNRAVELING: THE REMAKING OF THE MIDDLE EAST

Russell A. Berman

Itamar Rabinovich

Samuel Tadros

Fouad Ajami

Charles Hill

Lee Smith

ESSAYS

Joshua Teitelbaum

Habib C. Malik

Nibras Kazimi

Ziad Haider

Marius Deeb

[For a list of books published under the auspices of the WORKING GROUP ON ISLAMISM AND THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER, please see page 57.]

Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 651

Hoover Institution at Leland Stanford Junior University, Stanford, California, 94305-6010

Copyright 2014 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University

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HERBERT AND JANE DWIGHT WORKING GROUP ON ISLAMISM AND THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER:

ITS A MANTRA, but it is also true: the Middle East is being unmade and remade. The autocracies that gave so many of these states the appearance of stability are gone, their dreaded rulers dispatched to prison or exile or cut down by young people who had yearned for the end of the despotisms. These autocracies were large prisons, and in 2011, a storm overtook that stagnant world. The spectacle wasnt pretty, but prison riots never are. In the Fertile Crescent, the work of the colonial cartographersGertrude Bell, Winston Churchill, and Georges Clemenceau are in play as they have never been before. Arab nationalists were given to lamenting that they lived in nation-states invented by Western powers in the aftermath of the Great War. Now, a century later, with the ground burning in Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq and the religious sects at war, not even the most ardent nationalists can be sure that they can put in place anything better than the old order.

Men get used to the troubles they know, and the Greater Middle East seems fated for grief and breakdown. Outside powers approach it with dread; merciless political contenders have the run of it. There is swagger in Iran and a belief that the radical theocracy can bully its rivals into submission. There was a period when the United States provided a modicum of order in these Middle Eastern lands. But pleading fatigue, and financial scarcity at home, we have all but announced the end of that stewardship. We are poorer for that abdication, and the Middle East is thus left to the mercy of predators of every kind.

We asked a number of authors to give this spectacle of disorder their best try. We imposed no rules on them, as we were sure their essays would take us close to the sources of the malady.

FOUAD AJAMI

CHARLES HILL

SINCE AUGUST 2011 when he demanded that Bashar al-Assad step aside, the president of the United States has refused to make good on his own professed policy of regime change in Syria. Barack Obama has ignored both domestic critics of his position on Syria as well as Washingtons traditional regional partners clamoring for American leadership. In failing to intervene in the Syrian civil war for humanitarian reasons while also seizing a strategic opportunity to topple Assad, Obama has had to face down even members of his own administration, virtually all of whom, including cabinet officials and some of his closest aides, eventually came to argue for arming the anti-Assad rebels. Although Obama contends that he has on his side the vast majority of a war-weary America, an electorate that loathes the idea of yet another entanglement in the Middle East, the reality is that it was Obama himself who consistently undercut any alternatives. The US public, never eager for foreign adventures in the first place, was simply following the lead of a president who never made the case for a policy that could advance American interests and help save those destined for Assads meat grinder, without having to land tens of thousands of US troops.